New Jersey politicians shouldn't meddle with science

Pretty soon, it may be up to our politicians to decide how much arsenic should be permitted in your drinking water.

Forget environmental or health experts. A newly proposed bill would put scientific regulatory judgments into the highly unqualified hands of New Jersey legislators — and, by natural extension, lobbyists and special interests.

The bill would leave it up to these people in Trenton to determine whether New Jersey should be permitted to adopt environmental, safety and health standards that are tougher than federal regulations.

New Jersey is not Nebraska. This is the nation’s most densely populated state. Residents live amidst the lingering chemical pollution of the state’s industrial past, not to mention air pollution from a heavily trafficked Turnpike and airport.

Federal law is more lax on many environmental protections, like regulating the release of toxic chemicals from industrial plants and oil refineries. It’s also more permissive of ocean dumping. New Jersey doesn’t need any flashbacks to the late 1980s, when its shore scenery included hypodermic needles, grease balls from sewage treatment plants and the occasional dead dolphin.
When it comes to arsenic, a natural product of rock erosion in our drinking water, federal standards allow a cancer risk of 1-in-10,000. New Jersey’s number? One in a million. Big difference.

The sponsors of this proposed bill, Sens. Steven Oroho (R-Sussex) and Jeff Van Drew (D-Cape May), argue many of our state regulations are too costly and needlessly drive businesses out of New Jersey. They say this bill would cut through a maze of red tape.

But among the same businesses pushing against red tape are those that gave us crashes in the stock and housing markets, along with that massive, still-gushing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. One person’s bureaucracy is another’s crucial environmental protection.

Regulatory decisions are a lot more reliable coming from a scientist in a lab at the Department of Environmental Protection than somebody up for re-election. Let’s not have the polluters and their lawmaking friends write environmental policy in New Jersey.